Works of Ellen Wood

by Ellen Wood

  There was no Rose; but on her bed lay a sealed note, addressed to Miss Carr: —

  “DEAR MARY, “I know you have been against me for some time. Miss Seymour and I were rivals — equals on a fair ground; you would have helped her on, though it left me to a broken heart. I believe it has been a neck-and-neck race between us, but I have won. I hope mamma will reconcile herself to the step I am taking; I always longed to make a runaway marriage, it is so romantic; and if Frank flies out about it, I shan’t care, for I shan’t hear him. When next you see me I shall be

  “ROSE MARLBOROUGH.”

  “Look to Miss Seymour!” broke from the quivering lips of Adeline de Castella. And it was timely spoken, for Eleanor was fainting. Scarcely had she revived, when Mam’selle Fifine came up, angry at the delay.

  The note they did not dare to show; but were obliged to confess to the absence of Rose, saying, tout bonnement, as Adeline called it, that they could not find her.

  Rose not to be found! Madame de Nino was dining out, and Mam’selle Fifine was terrified out of her sober senses. In the midst of the hubbub that ensued, Julie, the head fille-de-chambre, put her head in at the door, and said, “The Honourable Mrs. Seymour.”

  At a time of less commotion they would have burst out laughing. Julie had been nurse in a nobleman’s family in England; she had there become familiar with British titles, and was as fond of using them as she was of using her English. One day Ethel Daw’s mother came to see her; a very fine lady, all flounces, and feathers, and gold chains. It was Julie’s luck to show her to the salon; and she came to the schoolroom afterwards, flung open the door, and called out, “Mrs. Daw, Esquire.” Julie did not hear the last of that. The girls called her ever after Squire Daw.

  “The Honourable Mrs. Seymour.”

  With a sharp cry Eleanor started up, and flew into her mother’s arms, sobbing convulsively.

  “Oh, mamma, take me home! take me home!”

  Mrs. Seymour was thunderstruck, not only at Eleanor’s cry of pain, but at the change in her appearance. She had just returned from London. Mary Carr disclosed a little of the truth. She thought it best; and, indeed, was unable to evade the keen questioning of Mrs, Seymour. But Rose’s note, with the information it contained, was buried in silence still. Mrs. Seymour took her daughter home at once; and there Eleanor told the whole — that Rose had really gone away with Mr. Marlborough. Mrs. Seymour folded her aristocratic hands, and distinctly desired that no further allusion to it should ever pass her daughter’s lips, as it would not her own. It was a retribution on them, she said, for having trusted an “iron man.”

  Meanwhile, Adeline de Castella and Mary Carr kept their own counsel through sheer obligation: as they had not declared all they knew at once, they dared not declare it now. And Madame de Nino verily believed Rose had been spirited away to the skies.

  It was three days afterwards. Mrs. Seymour sat in her drawing-room, the green Venetian shutters partially closed, and the blinds down, for Eleanor lay on the sofa quite prostrated. Mrs. Seymour was in a state of as much indignation as was consistent with her high birth and her proclaimed assertion that they were “well rid of him;” for, in spite of the “iron” drawback, she had grown to hug to her heart the prospect of this most desirable establishment for Eleanor.

  Suddenly the door opened, and the iron man himself walked in. Eleanor struggled up from the sofa, and Mrs. Seymour rose in hauteur, all the blood of the Loftuses flashing from her light grey eyes. Then ensued a contest; each side struggling for the mastership; Mrs. Seymour refusing to hold commune with him, and Mr. Marlborough insisting upon being heard.

  He had gone to England three days ago in search of her, he said; he then found she had left for France, and he had followed her. His object was to request that she would lay her commands on Eleanor to afford him an explanation. Eleanor had been his promised wife; and without offence on his part, without any known cause, her behaviour had suddenly changed to him. In vain he had sought an explanation of her; she would afford him none; and his only resource was to appeal to Mrs. Seymour. If Eleanor refused to fulfil her engagement with him, he could not insist upon it; but he must insist upon knowing the reason for the change: to that he had a right.

  “You had better leave the room quietly, sir,” said Mrs. Seymour in frigid tones. “It will not be pleasant to you if I call my servants.”

  “I will not leave it without an explanation,” he replied. “Mrs. Seymour, you cannot refuse it; if Eleanor will not give it me in courtesy, I repeat that I must demand it as a right. Eleanor’s conduct at the time seemed to imply that there was some cause of complaint against me. What was it? I declare to you solemnly that I was unconscious of it; that I was innocent of offence against her.”

  His words and manner were painfully earnest and truthful, and Mrs. Seymour hesitated.

  “Has there been any mistake, Eleanor?” she hesitated, appealing to her daughter.

  “Oh, let me know what it is,” he implored, before Eleanor could speak. “Whatever it may be — mistake — cause — reality — let me know it.”

  “Well, sir,” cried Mrs. Seymour, making a sudden resolution, “I will first ask you what you have done with that unfortunate young lady, whom you took away from her sheltering roof and her duties, three days ago?”

  “I took no young lady away,” replied Mr. Marlborough.

  “What have you done with Miss Darling?”

  “Not anything.”

  “You did not induce her to elope with you? You did not take her to London?”

  “Indeed, no. I saw Miss Darling on the port the evening I went away, and left her there. She was with her brother. But this is no explanation, Mrs. Seymour. Eleanor,” he added, walking up, and standing before her, “I once again appeal to you. What was the cause of your first and sudden coldness?”

  “Speak out, Eleanor,” said her mother. “I know almost as little as Mr. Marlborough, but I now think the matter should be cleared up, that we may come at the truth. There must be a strange mystery somewhere.”

  Eleanor pressed her thin hands upon her side in agitation. She could only speak in a whisper, in uneven sentences: and she told of the love-letter written to Rose the day following the dance at Sir Sandy Maxwell’s.

  “It was written to you, Eleanor,” said Mr. Marlborough.

  “I read that note,” she answered, gasping for breath. “It was written to Rose.”

  “It was written to you, Eleanor. I have never written a loving note, as that was, to Rose Darling in my life; on my sacred word of honour.”

  “You have written several notes to Rose!”

  “True; since; but never loving ones: they might all have been posted up on the schoolroom walls, and even Madame de Nino herself could not have found fault with them. If this note was given to Rose, Anna must have changed the envelopes. I remember directing one for her to Miss Darling that morning. Eleanor,” he gravely said, “I fear you have been running your head against a chimera.”

  “Rose loves you,” she whispered, her heart and voice alike softening.

  “No; nonsense!” — but for all his denial there was a glow of consciousness on Mr. Marlborough’s countenance. “Eleanor, I honestly believe that you have been listening to the folly talked by those schoolgirls, and taken it for gospel. Rose Darling is very pretty, and likes to be admired; and if I have been thrown a good deal with her, who threw me? You, Eleanor, by your coldness and avoidance of me. I don’t deny that I have talked lightly and gaily with Rose, never seriously; I don’t deny that—” I have kissed her, he was going to add in his candour, but thought it might be as well to leave that out before Mrs. Seymour. “But my love and my allegiance have never swerved from you, Eleanor.”

  She burst into happy tears. Mrs. Seymour cut them short sternly.

  “Eleanor, this note that you talk of, left by Miss Darling on her bed the other night, must have been meant as a hoax upon you and the two credulous young ladies, your companions. I did think it a most st
range thing that a young lady of position should be guilty of anything so vulgar as an elopement. Not but that it was excessively bad to make it the subject even of a jest.”

  “I suppose it must have been,” sobbed Eleanor. “And it seemed so earnest!”

  Mr. Marlborough could have disclosed how earnest, had he chosen. In that interview in the salon with Rose, when he told her he was going away, he learnt how much she loved him. In the anguish of parting, Rose dropped words that sufficiently enlightened him — if he had not been enlightened before. He passed it all off as a jest; he said something to the effect that he had better take her with him to Gretna, all in jest, in simple folly: and he spoke in this light manner for Rose’s sake: he would not suffer her to think she had betrayed her secret. What, then, was his astonishment when, in coming out of the permit office at night on the port, preparatory to stepping on board the boat, to see Rose! She had taken his words seriously. What he would have done to save the boat in his dilemma — for he must inevitably have lost it while he escorted Rose back to Madame de Nino’s — he did not know; but at that moment who should come up but Captain Darling. He gave the young lady into her brother’s charge, with a halfword of explanation; and he never supposed but that Rose had been safely lodged at school within the hour. But Mr. Marlborough was a man who could keep his counsel on these particulars, even to Eleanor, and he did keep it.

  “Let this be a warning to your wedded life, Eleanor,” observed Mrs. Seymour. “Never have any concealments from your husband. Had you frankly spoken to Mr. Marlborough of that first misdirected letter, which seems to have been the primary cause of all the mischief, the affair would have been cleared up at once.”

  “It’s enough to make a man swear he will never use another envelope,” exclaimed Mr. Marlborough, with his old happy smile of love. “But you need not have doubted me, Eleanor.”

  Meanwhile, where was Rose? Madame de Nino, in the eleventh stage of desperation and perplexity, sent ten times a day to Captain Darling’s lodgings; but he had disappeared also. Mam’selle Fifine, who of course came in for the blame, alternately sobbed and scolded aloud; and Adeline and Mary Carr felt sick with the weight of the secret they were keeping. This state of things, stormy within doors as the weather was without, lasted for three days, and then Rose returned, escorted by her brother.

  But what a shocking plight she was in! Drenched with rain and sea-water; clothes soaked and clinging round her; quite prostrated with three days’ sea-sickness; lying half-dead all that time in a rolling fishing-smack, the wind blowing great guns and she nearly dead with fright; nothing to eat and drink on board but salt herrings and sour beer, even supposing she could have eaten at all! — no wonder Rose forgot her good manners and told her brother he was a brute for taking her. Rose had happened to put on her best things, too: a white chip bonnet and pearl-grey damask dress. You should have seen them when she came in!

  So it was quite a mistake, Miss Carr and Adeline found, a trick, no doubt, played them purposely by Rose, and there had been no elopement at all, or thought of one: nothing but a three-days’ cruise round the coast with her brother, in the fishing-smack of some honest, rough, hard-working sailors! Captain Darling made a thousand apologies to Madame de Nino when he brought her home — the object that Rose presented upon his handing her out of the coach! — and laid it all to the fault of that treacherous wind; which had kept them at sea three days, when he had only contemplated treating her to a little excursion of an hour for the good of her health.

  Madame was appeased at length. But Mam’selle Fifine is sore upon the point to this day. As she justly observed, there must have been something out of the common amiss with that particular fishing-boat. Granted the rough wind; but other boats made the port fast enough, so why not that one? Rose could or would give no explanation, and was as sullen as a bear for a whole month.

  And ere that month had well run its course, news came down from Paris of the marriage of George Marlborough and Miss Seymour.

  CHAPTER XI.

  GEORGINA BEAUCLERC’S LOVE.

  WE must go to Castle Wafer. Isaac St. John has his writing-table drawn to the open window this mellow September day, and sits at it. But he is not writing now. He leans back in his padded chair, and the lines of thought — of care — lie on his otherwise serene face. Care for Isaac St. John the recluse? Verily, yes; even for him. If we could live lives of utter isolation from our species, we might escape it; otherwise, never.

  Looking at him now, his back buried in the soft chair, his face, so pleasant to the eye, turned rather upwards, and his thin white hands resting listlessly, one on the elbow of the chair, one down on his knee, a stranger would have failed to detect anything amiss with the person of Isaac St. John, or that it was not like other men’s. For the first forty years of Isaac St. John’s existence, his days had been as one long, everpresent mortification; that disfiguring hump and his sensitiveness doing battle together. Why it should be so, I know not, but it is an indisputable fact, that where any defect of person exists, any deformity — two of the qualities pertaining to our nature exist in the mind in a supereminent degree, sensitiveness and vanity, perhaps for the good of the soul, certainly to the marring of its peace. It has been so since the world began; it will be so to its ending. Isaac St. John was no exception. There never can be an exception; for this seems to be a law of nature. Remember the club-foot of Byron, and what it did for him. This shrinking sensitiveness, far more than his health, had converted Mr. St. John into a hermit. It was terrible to him to go forth unto the gaze of his fellow-men, for — he carried his deformity with him. Now that he was advancing in years, growing onwards to be an old man, the feeling was wearing off; the keen edge of the razor which had cut all ways was becoming somewhat blunt: but it must ever remain with him in a greater or lesser degree.

  He was not thinking of it now. It was when he was in the presence of others, or when making up his mind to go into their presence, that the defect was so painfully present to him. As he sat there, his brow knit with its lines, two things were troubling him: the one was a real, tangible care, the other was only a perplexity.

  His own mother had lived to bring him up; and how she had cherished and loved her unfortunate son, the only heir to the broad lands of the St. Johns, that son’s heart ached even now to think of. At the time she died, he wished he could die also; his happiest thoughts now were spent in her remembrance; his most comforting moments those when he lost himself in the anticipation of the meeting that awaited them hereafter. He was a grown-up man, getting old it almost seemed to his lonely heart, when the little half-brother was born, the only issue of his father’s second marriage. How Isaac St. John took to this little baby, loved it, fondled it, played with it, he might have been half ashamed to tell in words. The boy had been his; as his own; since the death of their father, he had been his sole care; and now that boy, grown to manhood, was going the way of the world and bringing trouble into his home. No very great and irremediable trouble yet: but enough to pain and worry the sensitive heart that so loved him.

  As if to compensate for the malformation of the one brother, the other was gifted with almost surpassing beauty. The good looks of Frederick St. John had become a proverb in the gay world. But these favoured sons of men are beset by temptations in an unusual degree, and perhaps they may not be much the better for the beauty in the long-run. Had Frederick St. John been less high-principled by nature; or been less carefully and prayerfully trained by his brother Isaac, things might have been a great deal worse with him than they were. He had not parted with honour, but he had parted with money; a handsome patrimony which he had succeeded to when he became of age, was mortgaged thick and threefold, and Mr. Frederick was deep in debt and embarrassment.

  Mr. St. John glanced towards some letters lying on his table. The letters had brought the trouble to him. It would seem as if Frederick’s affairs had in some way come to a sudden crisis, for these letters, three of them, had all arrived in the course of t
he past week. They were ugly letters from ugly creditors asking him to pay them; and until their reception Mr. St. John had not possessed any knowledge of the state of affairs. He had believed Frederick to be in the habit of getting rid of a great deal more money than he had need to do; but he had not glanced at debt, or embarrassment. It had so completely upset him — a little thing did that in his delicate health — that for a day and a night he was incapable of action; he could only nurse his pain. Then he sent answers to the parties, saying that the matters should be examined into; and he wrote to Frederick, who was in London, to come to him without delay. He was waiting for him; the senses of his ears were opened now, listening for his footsteps: he was growing anxious and weary, for Frederick might have responded to the call on the past day.

  That was the trouble. The other care mentioned, the perplexity, regarded his little cousin at Alnwick. He had promised George Carleton St. John (as you may remember) to take means of ascertaining whether Benja was well done by, happy, and cared for by his step-mother; but now that it came to action, Isaac St. John did not quite see how he was to set about it. Something he must do; for the promise lay on his conscience: and he was, of all men, the most conscientious. Mr. Carleton St. John had died in May; it was now September; and Isaac knew little or nothing of the affairs at Alnwick. He had corresponded a little with Mrs. Carleton St. John in the intervals of his own illness — for he had been seriously ill twice this summer; at the time of the death, and for some time after it, and again in July — and he had addressed two letters to Benja, simple letters fit for a child, and desired that that young gentleman would answer him by deputy. Somebody had scrawled these answers, probably the nurse, or guided Benja’s fingers to do it. “He was very well, and Brave was very well, and he thanked his guardian, Mr. Saint John, for writing to him, and he hopped he was very well, and he sent his love.” This did not tell Mr. St. John much: and the involuntary thought crossed him that had Benja been her own child Mrs. St. John might herself have helped him with the answers.